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The quest for greater productivity in application development has focused on using more abstraction in programming languages, which have evolved from binary machine code through second generation symbolic languages and third generation high-level languages.

However, 4GLs have failed to win widespread acceptance, and today's object-oriented programming languages are in truth no more abstract with respect to the real world than their third-generation predecessors.

Moreover, the commercial failure of object-oriented databases means that most modern commercial applications are designed and developed using object oriented techniques, but implemented over relational databases, an impedance mis-match that imposes further overheads on the development process.

Ted Codd acknowledged the connection between data architecture and programming productivity when in 1970 he introduced the relational model to the world with the words "Future users of large data banks must be protected from having to know how the data is organized in the machine".

The next major breakthrough in software development productivity will come not from advances in programming languages, but from a new database architecture.

Instead of using a separate, unique table for every different type of data, the associative model of data uses a single, generic structure to contain all types of data. Information about the logical structure of the data and the rules that govern it are stored alongside the data in the database.

This sets the scene for a new way of programming, whereby the data structures and the rules that govern them are no longer hard-coded into the programs, but are obtained by the programs from the database itself. Thus, for the first time, such programs are truly reusable, and no longer need to be amended when the data structures change. This dramatically reduces the cost of application development and maintenance.